RU.08 said:
Right, but you’ve brightened the entire background to get there. The point is this brightness difference is limited only to the lightsaber optical element - thus it’s from a 2nd composite, one made for telecine. There are two versions of the Jabba shot, and two versions of the Greedo shot (both with and without subtitles) so why shouldn’t there be two versions of this shot also?

Like I say, this is just a demonstration. I don’t have the exact transformation right and probably cant without the right materials. But it shows that the lightsaber look can be attained by clipping the highlights. Consider how different the transformations are between going from o-neg to low contrast interpositive to internegative to release print to scan to colormatch vs going from o-neg to low contrast interpositive to telecine to SD Tape. Different paths could affect the highlights differently.

And there really is no point in recomposing this shot, as you can see from the colormatch the only real difference is the lightsaber looking WORSE. Why would they do that? Why would they, finish the film, go back and change the intensity on the blades so they are blown out, create new film outs, telecine them, edit them into the video master, all at enormous expense for very little return.

I’m not saying that they CANT do that, its certainly possible, I just think very very very unlikely.

And subtitle shots are a different deal as the subtitles are not present on the interpositive which would have been scanned for this version. Subtitles are either cut or burn into internegatives so there are always clean versions of those shots avaliable. Clean versions aren’t made for the TV version they are made for international film prints.